Like a crop nearing harvest, Deathcult for Eternity: The Triumph shows The Chasm at a developmental stage in their career, green and budding with potential, yet still unfit for consumption.

Awkward vocals display a youthful fascination with high-pitched wails; drums lack the detail and precision of later albums; a garage-band production saps much of the group's energy with its flat, guitar-dominant mix.

Deathcult For Eternity's immature compositions are largely overshadowed by the taller, fuller-shaped form the band displays in 2002ís Conjuration of the Spectral Empire, as multiple cheap fade-out endings and dull weed-like riffs encumber the record's few scattered flowerings.

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I canít help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isnít a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesnít matter.

Interesting that most of the user comments to this New York Times article are defensive and negative.